Exam 1: Language, Thought, and Cullture

Question 1

Cultural Relativity

Answer 1

Language must be studied in context with its’ culture

Question 2

Linguistic Relativity

Answer 2

Language is reduced to a set of formal rules. Linguists are interested in discovering Universal Grammar.

Question 3

Do humans have an innate capacity for language?

Answer 3

No but there is an innate component in the language acquisition process. Acquiring language is deeply affected by the process of becoming a competent member of society.

Question 4

What do we know when we know a language? (For linguistic anthropologists)

Answer 4

One must know far more than an abstract set of grammatical rules. They study the final two components (semantics and pragmatics) in ways that integrate these two components with the first three.

Question 5

What do we know when we know a language? (Linguists)

Answer 5

Phonology, Morphology, Semantics, Syntax, Pragmatics. Focus more on one or more of the first three components.

Question 6

Phonology/ Phonemes

Answer 6

Study of sound in a language.

Question 7

Morphology

Answer 7

Study of internal structure of a word like suffixes, prefixes.

Question 8

Syntax

Answer 8

Study of the structure of sentences. Construction of phrases, clauses, and order of words. Must be able to use subjects, verbs, and objects grammatically correct.

Question 9

Semantics

Answer 9

Study of meaning in a language. Analysis of meaning of words and sentences. How sentences are understood by native speakers.

Question 10

Pragmatics

Answer 10

Study of language use, of how meanings emerge in actual social contexts. Cultural and linguistically specific ways of structuring narratives, performances, or everyday conversation

Question 11

What is “language as social action”

Answer 11

-Language cannot be understood without reference to the particular social contexts which it is used. every aspect of language is socially influenced and culturally meaningful.

Question 12

Multifunctionality

Answer 12

refers to all the different kinds of work that language does.

Question 13

Functions of multifunctionality

Answer 13

1. Speaker (expressive function) 2. Addressee (cognitive function- directs behavior and action) 3. Context (Referential function) 4. Message (poetic function) 5. Contact (Phatic function-used to establish a social connection) 6. Code (metalinguistic function)

Question 14

Language Ideologies

Answer 14

-attitudes, opinions, and beliefs or theories that we have about languages.

Question 15

Practice Theory

Answer 15

Language, culture, and society all have preexisting reality but at the same time are the products of individual humans’ words and actions.

Question 16

Habitus

Answer 16

A set of predispositions that produce practices and representations conditioned by the structures from which they emerge. This concept can be used to describe how people socialized in a certain way will often share many values as well as styles of eating, talking, or behaving. How we are predisposed to think and act in a certain way because of how we have been socialized.

Question 17

Icon

Answer 17

A sign that refers to its object by means of similarity. Choo Choo Meow. Universal.

Question 18

Index

Answer 18

An indexical sign points to its object through some connection or contiguity. Example is smoke indexes fire.

Question 19

Symbol

Answer 19

Socially constructed

Question 20

Matched Guise test

Answer 20

Used when interested in language ideologies. Involves recording individuals reading a s hort passage in two or more languages.

Question 21

Illustrator

Answer 21

Used while speaking, like talking with hands. Body language. Universal

Question 22

Emblems

Answer 22

Have arbitrary meaning that are socially constructed (peace out sign)

Question 23

Sapir-Whorf hypothesis

Answer 23

Language determines thought. Language you speak rigidly structures your thought in an inescapable manner.

Question 24

Whorfian Effect

Answer 24

Influences of language on thought

Question 25

The function of technostrategic language

Answer 25

Language use in certain communities of practice can predispose people to think and act in a particular way.

Question 26

Chomsky’s view of language acquisition

Answer 26

You are born with something called universal grammar. Idea is that there is an organ that we are born with that just simply develops. Language is something you are born with .

Question 27

Ochs & Schieffelin

Answer 27

children’s linguistic repertoire is not a simple reflection of what they do or do not hear in their surroundings, but rather children are taking an active role in constructing language that is most useful to their needs and appropriate to their social status.

Question 28

Lucy

Answer 28

shape vs. materiality. Mayan don’t have plural morpheme, they associate things by what they are made of rather than by their shapes as Americans do. There is no pluralization no morpheme to make it plural. Putting on a morpheme that codes for material. Do they think of objects differently? Romance languages have noun classes. How people behave depending on language.

Question 29

Whorf

Answer 29

influence that language has on how we think. Took it too far and created a large academic debate.

Question 30

Boas

Answer 30

Father of modern anthropology

Question 31

Axiomatic view

Answer 31

language, thought, and culture all connected

Question 32

relative

Answer 32

To my right to my left. this doesn’t work with an absolute frame

Question 33

Absolute

Answer 33

Uses a fixed, external bearing- compass direction, starboard, blocking, up/down river

Question 34

Defense intellectuals

Answer 34

Men, hired to defend the U.S. having weapons of mass destruction as deterrents to the use of such weapons by anyone else.

Question 35

Peirce’s three types of signs

Answer 35

Icon, indexes, and symbols